Writer Brian Michael Bendis: ‘This is just the first little chapter of a much larger story that will be told.’
Photograph: Marvel

One of the original X-Men is finally out of the closet – Iceman, it turns out, was never into Zelda the waitress in, you know, that way.

The decision to reveal that the Marvel Comics character is gay has caused consternation among fans – some of whom object to the suggestion that the character’s older self, as depicted elsewhere in the current Utopians storyline, is somehow not gay.

“It gets awkward when you apply gayness on a character that has presented themselves as straight since 1963,” wrote Josh Siegel on queer geek community site Geeks Out. “[Writer Brian Michael] Bendis seems to be dodging that a little by implying OLDER Iceman, the one we have read about for decades, is in fact straight. Or somehow ‘straighter’ than his younger self, having repressed his desires for so long. Does gayness really work that way?”

“You can cry ‘Iceman isn’t gay!!’ all you want, but the fact is, it’s there on the page. It happened,” wrote Tristan Cooper at Dorkly. “If it doesn’t make any sense to you, maybe you should find something else to read that doesn’t include superhumans who can read minds and shoot lasers out of their eyes.”

The current issue of All-New X-Men features the teenage X-Men time-traveling to meet their grimmer, more careworn future selves and deciding to stay to help make the future a better place. Writer Bendis said on Twitter he had hoped the revelation about Iceman would pass without much comment.

BRIAN MICHAEL BENDIS (@BRIANMBENDIS)

i swear on my dogs, i wanted the issue to come out and just be. no press. no sensational headlines. no leaks. oh, well…

“There are thousands if not millions of stories of people who, for many different reasons, felt the need to hide their sexuality,” Bendis told the Guardian. “The X-Men, with the conceit of time travel, give us a fascinating platform in which to examine such personal journeys. This is just the first little chapter of a much larger story that will be told.”

Kurt Busiek, who has written stories about nearly everyone in the Marvel universe and is something of an ad hoc superhero historian, said that there had been more than one case of characters, for whatever reason, never really having a heterosexual relationship and becoming favorites of the gay fan community.

“The rumors that Iceman could be gay cropped up around the Iceman miniseries that came out in the mid-to-latter 80s,” Busiek said. “At that point, part of it was readers were wondering if some of these longtime characters were gay just like some of the people we’d known for a lot of years. Element Lad in [DC Comics’s] Legion of Superheroes was another.”

Element Lad turned out to be gay, too. “A character could be gay because he’d never been involved in a long-term heterosexual romance,” Busiek explained. “If something like that lasts a long time, eventually you’ll find a writer who goes, ‘Yeah, why not?’ It gives you new places to go.”

Mark Evanier, biographer and friend of late X-Men creator Jack Kirby, said he saw the decision as more cynical. “The problem is when you have a character who’s been handled by so many different writers and editors over the years, people find little nuances and seize upon them, and editors say, ‘We need an event this month. Who can we maim, or kill, or out, or marry in order to create an event?’” Evanier said. “And that doesn’t always result in a bad comic book. But it’s arbitrary.”

Busiek said the decision felt plausible from his perspective. “His flirtations with Zelda the waitress in the 1960s have not turned out to have been based on true heterosexual lust – so what? He was a prep school student. He didn’t have to have it all figured out by then.”